Sharing a career full of memories and personal beliefs

Ron Bracken walked into our newsroom in 1967 and immediately started covering high school football games.

He hasn't stopped in 41 years. His Centre Daily Times career has included three stints as sports editor, including this current 11-year run.

Many of his great stories are included in the book "Replays," published four years ago and still available in our office. They're as good today as they were two or three decades ago.

Bracken plans to start relaxing June 30, when he retires after a wonderful career of reporting and storytelling.

We'll have more to say about him closer to that time, but today I want to alert you to his retirement and to the sports section for the start of a farewell tour of columns.

Bracken will share highlights of his career every Sunday for eight weeks, in what should be required reading for sports fans of all ages.

His career, of course, goes back to the start of the Joe Paterno era and includes all four Penn State national championship football games. It also takes in the amazing changes over time in Centre County high school sports and in sports overall.

"I've seen the rise of local scholastic teams in various sports to become state and even national champions," he said. "I've seen the women's sports blossom to the point where they are now fully equal to the men's sports at both the scholastic and collegiate level."

He said there have been "too many great events, athletes, coaches and people to acknowledge in one final farewell column." That led to the idea for a series of columns, with accompanying photos.

They'll spark your memories and generate conversations, no doubt. I hope you enjoy them as much as I will.

• • •

The local version of the popular “This I Believe” feature on National Public Radio is only two months old, but already a local resident has been chosen for the national broadcast.

Holly Dunsworth, a postdoctoral researcher in the anthropology department at Penn State, is reading her essay on NPR’s “Weekend Edition Sunday” show this morning on WPSU-FM 91.5.

Perhaps you’ll catch it if you’re reading this before 10 a.m., but don’t worry if you’re not. You can read Dunsworth’s essay today in our Centre Living section and you can hear her read it during WPSU’s weekly “This I Believe” segment at 5:45 p.m. Thursday.

Dunsworth may be the first person in central Pennsylvania to have an essay selected for the national show, which began in 2005.

We’re pleased to partner with WPSU in the local “This I Believe” effort, and we previously published submitted columns by Saloni Jain, Suzan Yener, Gregg Rogers and Skye Hibbard-Swanson. Based on the reaction from readers, we’ll certainly publish more in coming months.

You’re invited to share their values and personal beliefs in essays of about 450 words. Details can be found at www.wpsu.org/believe. Dunsworth, of State College, submitted her essay locally, and it quickly drew national attention. “I am evolution,” she begins, and her career soon comes into focus.

Her specialty is paleoanthropology. “I study the fossil record of human, ape and monkey evolution over the past 20 million years,” she told me in an e-mail. “I use clues from the anatomy of the fossils to reconstruct what the extinct creatures were like, what they ate, how they moved about, etc.”

She’ll move on this fall to become an assistant professor of anthropology at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago.

Enjoy her column and this series, generated by your neighbors and friends, in print and on the air.

As always, please contact me with concerns you have about anything in the Centre Daily Times or online at www.centredaily.com. Executive Editor Bob Heisse can be reached at bheisse@centredaily.com or 231-4640. His blog, “Back in Happy Valley,” is on the Web site.